ev. Mr. Gilbert Burnet, Minister of Clerkenwell, and an eminent
apothecary, both lately deceased.' The date is May 7, 1747. Some of the
prices in this catalogue can only be described as absurd; for example,
Lydgate's 'Bochas; or, The Fall of Princes,' 1517, 5s.; a collection of
old plays and poems, two volumes, 1592, 6s.; Tusser's 'Five Hundred
Points of Good Husbandry,' 1574, 2s. 6d.; and black-letter books by the
score are here offered at sums from one to three or four shillings each.
The neighbourhood has for many years ceased to be a bookselling
locality, for although book-hunters prefer side-streets and quiet
thoroughfares for the prosecution of their hobby, the pestiferous
vapours of Drury Lane would kill any bibliopolic growth more vigorous
than a newsvendor's shop.

[Illustration: _Messrs. Sotheran's Shop in Piccadilly._]

When, by slow degrees, the various trades moved in a direction west of
Temple Bar, it was only natural that the trade in second-hand books
should be similarly attracted. The Strand itself, which, at the end of
the last century and beginning of the present, was a much narrower
street than it is now, is not, and never has been, a great
book-emporium, for a reason which we have more than once pointed out.
But the immediate vicinity has been for over a century and a half, as it
still continues to be, the favourite locality of some of the chief
booksellers. To-day the Strand proper only contains three
representatives, in Messrs. H. Sotheran and Co., the finer of whose two
shops is in Piccadilly, and Mr. David Nutt (both of whom are, however,
vendors of new books, and often act as publishers), and Messrs.
Walford. Within a stone's-throw of the main thoroughfare we have John
Galwey and Suckling and Galloway, Garrick Street; James Gunn and
Nattali, Bedford Street; B. F. Stevens, Trafalgar Square; H. Fawcett,
King Street; W. Wesley and Sons, Essex Street; and many others. One of
the most interesting incidents in connection with the Strand relates to
a house which stood between Arundel and Norfolk Streets, where, at the
end of the seventeenth century, lived the father of Bishop Burnet. 'This
house,' says Dr. Hughson, writing in 1810, 'continued in the Burnet
family till within living memory, being possessed by a bookseller of the
same name--a collateral descendant of the Bishop.' Of much more
importance, however, is the fact that at 132, Strand a bookseller named
Wright started, about 1730, the first c